BATTLE OF THE BANKERS

In the old days of the Soviet Union, Communist ideologists taught the simpleminded notion that the bourgeois capitalist world was run by small groups of monopolists who manipulated governments and the news media from the comfort of their wood-paneled offices.

Now, in the new Russia, the half-dozen or so richest men in the country seem to be living out that teaching. These new oligarchs, all fabulously rich thanks mainly to their intimacy with the country's democratic leaders, control as much as half the country's gross domestic product and many of the most powerful media outlets. Last year they played a major role in the re-election of President Boris Yeltsin. To say, as many Russians do, that the oligarchs run the country is an exaggeration. To say they would like to is closer to the truth.

But their power and wealth are so great, their control of the economy so pervasive and their rivalries so bitter that Yeltsin is trying to bring them to heel, declaring that the state is going to again assume more control of the economy. Yeltsin, whose re-election campaign was generously funded by the new oligarchs, warned that he would not tolerate "any effort by businessmen and bankers to exert pressure on the government." Yeltsin's words echoed those of Anatoli Chubais, his abrasive First Deputy Premier, who said recently that Russia could not allow "two or three or five major financial institutions" to run the state.

The declarations by Yeltsin and Chubais signaled the start of a bitter and potentially crucial power struggle between the government's young Vice Premiers, Chubais and Boris Nemtsov, on the one hand, and several of the most powerful oligarchs on the other. While Yeltsin instructed both sides in what is now known as the bankers' war to cool it, the war has instead heated up. Last week came news that one of the warring oligarchs had been questioned by Interior Ministry investigators and that one of his Russian-American associates had had his Russian visa confiscated as he left Moscow and had been placed on a list of immigration "undesirables."

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, most people expected a burgeoning of political parties to fill the vacuum left by the communists. Parties did emerge, but in the tightly controlled presidential system that was hand-tailored for Yeltsin what counts is access--to the President, to his few closest aides and family members, and to half a dozen or so top government officials.

And it is money that fuels that access. Most of the oligarchs got started in the late '80s with money whose origins remain murky. There have been repeated allegations--and repeated denials--that the new millionaires received their start-up capital from the Communist Party, the KGB or other giants of the old system. In any event their companies did well during the privatization of the Russian economy in the early '90s. Perhaps their biggest break came in 1995. Nearly bankrupt, the government offered shares in some of the country's biggest concerns, like oil and mineral resources. The oligarchs gained control of one enterprise after another at huge discounts from their real value.